I added this to my list because I loved the two previous films I’ve watched by the filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger so much. Unfortunately this turned out to be a lesser film that at times comes close to being campy. It takes some interesting twists that keep it from being trite including pitting the United States against Britain in a contest over moral superiority. There is some startling imagery and some fascinating perspective presented here, but ultimately this is too shallow a film to worth bothering with.

Peter Carter, an RAF pilot, is the only surviving crewmember left on his bomber as it is returning after a mission over Germany in World War 2. He explains his situation to an American radio operator named June and tells her that he doesn’t have a parachute but will bail out anyway rather than burn up in a crashing plane. However after he jumps he washes up on the beach instead of dying and ends up near the Air Force base where June works. They meet and instantly fall in love with each other. However Conductor 71, a Frenchman who was guillotined during the French Revolution, descends from the Other World to tell Peter that he was supposed to die and offers to take him. Peter declines, insisting that he has fallen in love with June, and wants to live. No one else can see Conductor 71 when he speaks to Peter as time is frozen during their conversation so June thinks Peter is hallucinating. She seeks assistance from the local doctor Reeves who has some expertise in neurology while Conductor 71 returns to the Other World. There the authorities decide that there will be a trial to determine if Peter will be allowed to remain in the living world.

As usual, it’s necessary to judge this film by the standards of the time it was made in, that is the 1940s, and by that metric, this is striking and creative in some interesting ways. It avoids calling the Other World and its inhabitants a Christian Heaven even though the imagery mostly matches that aesthetic. It explicitly makes sure that there are people of all nationalities and plenty of non-white ethnicities present in the Other World, including non-American blacks, Latinos, South Asians, East Asians and so on. It also takes on a grand, cosmic view, with its opening shot being that of the universe as a whole. Many people seem to know this film under the alternative title Stairway to Heaven, because of the literal, giant moving escalator to heaven they included. Still the inclusivity only goes so far as the values espoused here are very much Western ones and it’s kind of silly why Peter and June being in love is reason enough to break the rules. I find the romance here completely uninteresting and it’s ridiculous that, spoiler alert, Dr. Reeves dies and no one really cares about him at all.

It is amusing and strange to see the UK being accused by the US of being a global hegemon. Did Powell and Pressburger really not see the end of Great Britain as the world’s leading superpower as late as 1946? I guess they really, really loved their country. Overall this is too facile and sentimental a film to be worth taking seriously and a real letdown compared to the previous two films I’ve watched.